Category: Organizations

The Co-op Bank in the UK has asked an evangelical Christian group to close its account at the bank because of the group’s anti-homosexual views. The bank stated that the opinions of Christian Voice were incompatible with the bank’ stance on diversity and human rights.

Good for them! Christian Voice is a very extreme organisation. Its director, Stephen Green, was interviewed on Radio 4 this morning.

As Justin McKeating wrote on the Chicken Yoghurt blog today: "As cheering as it was to hear Stephen Green exposed as a whinnying fool yet again, I think it’s a little unfair that such a small unrepresentative group of yahoos are given all this airtime". True, but Green was given ample opportunity to show himself up as a bigot and an idiot, and he did not disappoint one iota. A link to the radio interview is on the Chicken Yoghurt blog. 

There was an interesting article earlier this week in The Guardian about the consultancy firm of McKinsey, and the influence it is having on the UK government.

There is no doubt that McKinsey has a very strong organisational culture – as the article states, McKinsey has nicknames such as The Brotherhood, The Firm, or the Jesuits of Capitalism. During my working life, I encountered McKinsey on a couple of occasions (and also their kin, Accenture, on more than a few occasions), and I can attest to the sense that I was working with people with a very particular worldview.

The Guardian article questions whether in fact the McKinsey culture is a totally benign influence on the UK government, and of course we shouldn’t forget that Enron was regarded as "the house that McKinsey built". For my own part, I believe the influence of such a monoculture to be pretty baleful, and I have commented before on my impression that the Labour party of Blair has no soul, and disturbingly few principles that chime with me.

I use the term monoculture, because that is the strongest impression that I have of McKinsey – you have to fit with the culture, or you’re out. I’m sure that they view this as a source of strength, but having a lack of diversity can be a weakness. In fact, there’s been work to demonstrate that diverse teams outperform monoculture teams, providing that the diversity can be managed properly.

Dr. Carol Kovach has done research at the Graduate School of Management at UCLA that demonstrated that cultural diversity can have both positive and negative impacts on teams. Diversity has been shown to augment potential productivity, but it also increases the complexity of the processes that must occur for a team to reach its full potential. Highly productive teams differ from less productive teams in how they manage their diversity, not, as is commonly believed, in the presence or absence of diversity. When well managed, diversity becomes an asset and productive resource for the team. When ignored, diversity causes process problems that diminish a team’s productivity. This is illustrated in the simple diagram here.

And I know from my own experience that the most exhillarating (as well as at times, the most frustrating) team I ever worked with was one that by design was set up to be as diverse as possible. When we learned how to manage our diversity, we were extremely productive, and came up with great results.